Fix for the "Toon Stuck in Place" Problem?

[Silearth 6]

It seems that I am the only one suffering from this problem these days. I start sacred, the two first screens load and then the third screen with the progress bar pops up. There are three posibilities here:

1) the screen goes black for a second and then the games starts

2) the progress bar fills super-fast--perhaps it only goes halfway before the game starts

3) the progress bar fills at a normal rate

 

1 & 2 have a 100% chance of arriving on the island to find that my toon is stuck in place, the merchants are gone and no chest is visible. This didn't happen under Vista. Since upgrading from Vista to XP, it's been happening more often--almost every time I start sacred. Restarting Sacred fixes it, but now it can take three restarts or a reboot to fix it.

 

We know this to be caused by granny.dll. Not sure what that file does but all searches bring me back to the SIF or a company that may be the creator of it.

 

Once when complaining on the server it was suggested that I try bringing a fresh copy from the DVD. Well I went one step further and downloaded a copy from the net.

Thoughts of the possible dangers drifted through my thoughts--but it was late at night and I was tired. The file I downloaded was larger than the one provided with Underworld, but I backed up the original granny.dll and slapped the new one into the directory.

 

The result? A nice smooth progress bar and no stuck toons. I've tried starting Underworld about 5 times since and no problems yet. Only time will tell if I did the right thing.

[Carolyn Hacker 0]

or a company that may be the creator of it.

More information about granny can be found here. I'm going to guess that the problems aren't limited to Sacred alone (which undoubtedly uses an older version that what's current now, due to the age of the game), since when I did a google search for "granny.dll" the first several links were for downloads, and only after skimming past them did I get to the site I linked.